Scripture: Matthew 18:19-20; Matthew 18:21-22; John 10:14; 2 Corinthians 2:17; Matthew 11:28 Series: 2020
Opening a new series called The Way, the pastor uses Matthew 18:19-20 to argue that discipleship is following Jesus together, not alone. A personal story of climbing the wrong Colorado mountain solo frames the folly of self-sufficiency. He contrasts the church’s costly grace (Bonhoeffer) with the cheap, well-marketed grace sold by a consumer culture that breeds fanatics and cacophonous distraction, and insists the church is a hospital for the weary, gathered around Christ rather than mutual affinity. Drawing on Matthew 18:21-22, he calls for radical forgiveness possible only by grace where two or three gather, and commends reading Scripture together through small groups and Bible studies, promising new on-ramps for everyone amid pandemic separation.
Illustrations: wrong-mountain-hike-colorado, unequal-roommate, church-hospital-for-the-soul, brand-fanatics-chickfila-apple, charles-ives-central-park-dark, bonhoeffer-cheap-vs-costly-grace, cheap-grace-social-media, nazareth-insignificant-town, pandemic-gathered-online
September 6
Matthew 18:19-20
“Again, truly I tell you, if two of your agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
There is a difference between walking together and walking alone. There is a difference between hiking together and hiking alone. When I lived in Colorado, I spent a lot of time hiking mountains by myself for the first few months of my stay. For the last few months, I always had a partner and the main incident that changed this was a hike in Central Colorado a little south of Aspen, there is a Mt. Wilson and I was excited to go there. There was a nice little entry hike to a beautiful mountain lake. I got to camp, where I camped before I climbed the summit. It was a lovely experience. I woke up early, about 5:00am, to get going. I had my head lamp on. I was ready. I had checked the map. I had checked the terrain. I was very experienced. I knew what I was doing. I started following the trail with my head down. When you are walking early in the morning and you are using a headlamp, you don’t really have your head up a lot because it is really dark. You want to keep your eye on the trail because you don’t want to lose the trail. And so, I kept my eyes on the trail. And so I kept on going. And at the same time, the trail started to go up a little more than I was expecting. Most of the trails that I had been on in Colorado were blazed only in the last 50 years, so they had used a lot of modern trailblazing techniques; especially switchbacks. But the angle started getting steeper and steeper and there weren’t any switchbacks. And so, when the sun finally came out, I realized that I was halfway up the wrong mountain. And then, again, I made a decision because i was hiking by myself, that in hindsight was foolish, and I decided to keep on going instead of going back down the mountain in order to find the trail. I thought I was being more efficient going up the mountain. Once I realized my mistake, I was just going to go through it. I would get to the top of the mountain, and it looked like there was a nice ridge where I could walk over to the trail. I thought it would be a lot shorter to keep going, until I got to the top of the mountain and it was totally exposed on both sides with a ridge about the width of my hand. And the next mountain was a good ways away. Then I had to keep on going by straddling the summit of the mountain and shimmying for half a mile in order to get back to the right path. Hiking alone is not always the best decision. I had been on dozens of climbs and dozens of hikes by myself until that moment, but it only takes one big mistake by yourself to realize the error and folly of your actions. My brothers and sisters, we are starting a new series called the Way. Jesus says in John 10, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” The early Christians called themselves followers of the Way. As Pastor Matt preached last week about discipleship, and about being a viator, one of the Latin phrases he used: a person on the way. And so this series is going to be about what life is like on the way. Understanding discipipleship in that conceptual framework. That discipleship is not principally about discipline. Discipulus, in Greek, is a student. Someone who studies from a master. You learn by walking with Jesus. You learn by following the way. Our Scripture for today comes from Matthew 18:29-20. “Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” When Jesus calls us, Jesus calls us to life together with others, with other Christians, to live life fully in Christ and through Christ. Life together is not about efficient living, as anybody who has lived with other people knows, it is not the most efficient thing in the world to have other people in your life. You may be someone who is really good at doing the dishes and cooking food and taking care of yourself, and then you get a roomate and they have never cooked and never did a thing and they come into this living arrangement and they don’t really put in what they take out. And that can be challenging. There are very relationships in life where people put equal energy in all the time. I can’t imagine a marriage lasting where the couple is 50/50 all the time. Life ebbs and flows. Some partners go through rough patches and you have to help them. That happens with the best of relationships. It happens with all relationships. All friendships. There are ebbs and flows. There are times when some people are stronger and some weaker and you have to help each other and lift up each other. It is not about efficiency. It is not about getting to some idealized state. Sometimes, the church is presented as a place where people already have everything figured out, but that is a lie. The church is more like a hospital for the soul, for those in need of care and hope. Jesus says, “Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” When we pretend that we are not weary and not heavy laden, the church can fall into this temptation as if we are trying to sell something, like we are peddlers of an everlasting life tonic. That misses out on what is actually the heart of life together. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 2, we are not peddlers of God’s word, but people of sincerity. We are not trying to sell something. We are not trying to sell you on anything. This is why Paul goes on and on, throughout his letters, about the simplicity of his rhetoric. He has been trained in the best schools, he knows the best speech, but he doesn’t want to use it, because he wants to offer Christ as humbly and clearly as possible and that Christ is the one who transforms souls. The Holy Spirit is the one who transforms souls. Our rhetoric cannot do that. My speech alone cannot do that. The best sermon in the world can save no one. The power of the Holy Spirit working in the midst of the gathered body of Christ, whether we are gathered in person or whether we are as we are net, it is only Christ working in the midst of us that any life can change. That any person can be reborn. As well, the challenges in life are not always as clear as walking up the wrong mountain. Very few times in life do you come upon an intersection and decide: right, left, straight. There are very few decisions that are so clear cut. Most of our lives, we have too many options, to many possibilities. I said earlier that church is not about selling something, we are not peddlers of God’s word, but there are a lot of people selling things. Most people are selling things. You drive in your car, and people are selling things. It is good to have an economy. It is good to have a marketplace but that doesn’t mean that we need all the things that are being sold. But everybody selling things wants us to need them. It is one thing to sell a product that can help you in your day, it is another to sell a need. People consulted to help create brand fanatics. You see this with Chick-fil-é and Apple Computers and Sports teams. This is the desire: to turn people into fanatics. Fanatics do not think straight. If you call someone a fanatic apart from a sports team, that is not really a positive description of them. We are being pulled, as people, in so many different directions. There is this wonderful musical term, cacophony where there is too much sound. It is that moment in the song when it is loud and you cannot distinguish the different instruments that are being played. The early twentieth century composer, Charles Ives, has this piece, Central Park in the Dark, and it is composed in a way as if there are two marching bands crashing in to each other and they have different time signatures. It is stunning and loud and strange to hear this clash. This is what life can. We are offered cacophonous options. If you google, what should I do with my life, you are going to get 6 million results of options. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian and pastor wrote a book that was first translated as The Cost of Discipleship, but was recently published as just, Discipleship, and on the very first page of the book articulates the difference between Cheap Grace and Costly Grace. And I think that that is so important. Cheap grace is the grace that is trying to be sold. Cheap grace is the grace that tells you everything you are doing is already great. You don’t have to change anything about you. You don’t have to love anybody you are not already loving. You don’t have to do anything you aren’t already doing. That is cheap grace, and we don’t want to imagine ourselves as practitioners of cheap grace, but we must be honest about the reality that it is offered in our world. Cheap grace is the grace that is sold. And, man, is it shiny. It is shiny and slick and the packaging is great. Cheap grace has a wonderful social media team and they are on top of it. Bonhoeffer contrasts cheap grace with costly grace, the grace of the way of Jesus Christ on the way to the cross. The grace that is willing to give up for others. The grace that is willing to change for others. The grace that is willing to seek holiness. The grace that is willing to seek the good of the other person more than my own good. That is the way that is offered. And that costly grace, in some ways, is costly because it is a grace together, it is shared together. It means, I need to gather together with people that I don’t agree with on every issue. That I need to gather together and not be afraid of that. It can be costly to be in a group of people and then politics comes up or how much people make comes up, where you went to college or if you didn’t go to college, and there is that nervous moment when you don’t know what is going to happen. And when you realize that we in the church need to be the church in a fearless way, that what gathers us together is not our affinity for each other, it is not just that we are so darn likable, it is that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. It is that God looked out on this world and saw the brokenness of this world, the world that God had created. God saw the brokenness, saw the disease and the strife and the pride and the sloth and all the ways that people were tearing each other apart, and all the ways that disease destruction were tearing the world apart, and God did not settle for that. But instead, offered God’s son, Jesus Christ, to be born of Mary. Born the son of a carpenter, in a backwoods town called Nazareth. He was born in Bethlehem, but he was raised in Nazareth. Nazareth wasn’t even on early maps. It was such an insignificant place. But that Son of God would grow up, would start a ministry. Would heal, would preach God’s word. Would offer light. Would call disciples to the way. And then he would turn his face to Jerusalem and walk faithfully, following his father’s will, all the way to the cross, but that is not the end of the story. Because after he was killed for love, after he was killed for being faithful, Jesus rose again, and we have this amazing reality that Christ has conquered death, that death no longer has the sting it once had over the world, and yet as Christians, we cannot just jump to resurrection. That is what cheap grace does. Cheap grace wants to jump ahead to the end of the story and pretend that Christ didn’t walk through the valley of the shadow of death in order to save us, and that this world still has a lot of valleys with a lot of shadows. And the reality that CHrist is more present in those valleys. Not only does God call us to follow Jesus calls us together. Now, the thing about other people is that they are other people and other people make mistakes. Not you all, of course, not any of you, but other people. There are people who have stolen things. There are people who have not told the truth. Who have done not great things. Who have not followed through on what they said they were going to do. Who have hurt you. Who have hurt us. Now right after this passage in Matthew 18, which is about church discipline, in verse 21-22, Peter asks Jesus, “How often should we forgive our brother who sins against us?” And Jesus says, “Not seven times, but seven times seventy times. We need to forgive again and again. We need to hold each other accountable in life, but we need to forgive and have mercy. Mercy is not an easy thing. Mercy is not a cheap thing. Forgving someone for hurting you is really hard. I honestly think that forgiving another person is impossible. And it only ever happens through grace, only through the miracle of God’s grace and presence with us. Where two or three are gathered, Christ is in the midst of them. And mercy is possible. Forgiveness is possible. Life together is possible. We are called on this way of discipleship not on the way of self-actualization, not on the way of hacking our bodies to make sure that we are at peak performance, because we are not always going to be at peak performance. There is going to be decline. There are going to be ebbs and flows. Life happens. But it doesn’t matter if you are an ironman athelete or if you can’t walk any more, you are a beloved child of God. And your value is not in what you do or what you know or who you know or how much you have, your value is firmly set in the foundation of Jesus Christ. You are a child of God. You are loved and you have purpose in this world. And you are called to be with each otehr. The way of Jesus Christ is a way together. Only through Christ and in Christ can we be a part of the church, can we be a part Christians. Christinaity, faith, is not just for people who are set up and live on their own. One of the reasons why reading the bible together is so imoprtant is that sometimes when you read the bible by yourself, you can act like I did on that mountain and think you have it all figured out, and think you have all the answers, before you realize that you don’t. And we need to talk to each other. God speaks to us through the Bible, but we need to read it together. This is the importance of small groups and Bible Studies and reading scripture together. Only by grace can we see God speaking to us. That happens individually, but it is more likely to happen when we are together, when we can talk about it. We can see, we can journey, we can dig into God’s word together. God has offered you a way: a way of life and of truth by following Jesus. Now some of you are already participating in Bible Studies and small groups, and that is wonderful. Some of you have a lot going on in your life and you can’t imagine what it would be like to add another committment. And we want to work with that. We want to make sure that studying the Bible and studying God’s word is not just for people with a little extra time in their life. And so, over the next few weeks, we are going to work through some different opportunities and different ideas and forms of bible study and small groups, and ways of gathering so that it is not just for people who have time, but for everybody. That all of us have an opprtunity to gather together, to read God’s word together, to walk on the way together. That following Jesus is a group activity. And as we go forward, we need to make sure that we are being a part of the church. And so remember, my brothers and sisters, that you are loved. That you are forgiven, that you are called to be a part of the church together. You are called by Jesus Christ. You are here by Jesus Christ. Give thanks to God this day. And though we miss being together as we did before, let us be thankful for the times that we gathered in that way. And let us look in earnest anticipation forward to the day when we celebrate, when we will be able to gather fully, with masks off, when we will be able to hold each other, to lift each other up. To shake hands, to eat together, to do the things that we have not been able to do. Let us look forward to that. And let us now in this time and in this day seek ways of following the Way together. Let us seek ways of entering into God’s word together, of taking a step forward on the life of faith together. And let me help you on that journey, let Pastor Matt help you. Reach out to us. Seek the guidance of those whom you respect in faith. You are not alone. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.